Metal and Middle East peace celebrated at award show

Peace in the Middle East and Darth Vader are two of the highlights of this year's Metal Hammer Golden Gods Awards which celebrate the best in heavy metal. Helen Long reports.

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The Metal Hammer Golden Gods awards, which were held in London on June 16th, were always going to be a little off the wall as they were hosted for the second time by mock-metal band Steel Panther.
SOUNDBITE (English) Award Hosts, Steel Panther, saying:
Satchel: "I just want to get drunk.... as drunk as possible."
Michael Starr: "You know the cool thing is that they gave us the liberty to really ad lib and just be ourselves so if we really don't like who won we can change it to the other nominee."
Lexxi Foxx: "Here's the thing. We can do whatever we want because if this show sucks or we just don't really care because we're hammered, it's not our fault because we didn't invite ourselves."
Satchel: "Yeah, he's right."
The surprises kept coming with Kobi Farhi from Israeli band Orphaned Land sharing their Global Metal award with Palestinian band Khalas.
SOUNDBITE (English) Orphaned Land Lead Singer, Kobi Farhi, saying:
"It's important especially for musicians to show an example, especially to politicians who fail to do that, to give them a simple example of how friendship, how brotherhood can be created between musicians, how easy it is. For me and Abed it's natural, I'm Israeli, he's Palestinian but we are brothers and if it's one thing that you do with your brothers, you want to share with them."
The Spirit of Hammer award went to David Prowse, who's known better internationally as Darth Vader from the original Star Wars movies.
SOUNDBITE (English) Spirit Of Hammer And Darth Vader Actor, David Prowse, saying:
"It's an amazing situation, the whole of the Star Wars phenomena, the three movies that I did - episodes six, seven, eight, wasn't it? No, four, five, six. Sorry, four, five, six. They were 30 odd years ago and I'm travelling all over the world and if I wanted to, I could be somewhere different in the world every weekend."
Although it's unclear if they read out the correct name in the envelope, Steel Panther walked home winners by getting the Best Video award.

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